The Western Ground Parrot (Pezoporus flaviventris) is a Western Australian endemic bird that is perilously close to extinction. This blog aims to compile an archive of information garnered between the 1800s and 2009 about this elusive bird. Up-to-date information about the Western Ground Parrot, including current conservation measures, can be found from the Friends of the Western Ground Parrot website :
http://western-ground-parrot.org.au

Saturday, September 28, 2013

The
museum holds seventeen Ground Parrot skins. Most, if not all of them, would
have been part of G. M. Mathews’ huge collection of Australian bird skins which
numbered 30,000. He had an additional 10,000 bird skins. The collection was
acquired by the museum in 1931 to Mathews’ disappointment as although he had to
sell it in the late 1920s due financial difficulties, he had hoped it would
stay in Australia or England.

The
seventeen skins are made up of one from Western Australia, two from South
Australia, one from Victoria, twelve from New South Wales and one from
Australia. Below is information about some of the skins, obtained from the
museum’s website.

This is the
only specimen of a Western Ground Parrot in the collection. Presumably it was
collected for Mathews, by Whitlock who lived near Wilson’s Inlet. This juvenile
just might have been one of the WGP chicks that Whitlock had discovered on 20
October in the same vicinity. (See blog entry August 2013 ‘Finding Western
Ground Parrot nests’.

Saturday, September 21, 2013

The Swedish
scientist Carl Linnaeus developed the binomial nomenclature taxonomic classification
system over many years starting with the publication in 1735 of the first of
several editions of Systema Naturae.
It was based on a scheme begun a couple of hundred years earlier by the Bauhin
brothers but is attributed to Linnaeus because he refined and used it
consistently showing that it can be used to effectively classify all the
world’s plants and animals. The Linnaeus system is used to this day. After more
basic divisions, each plant or animal is allocated into a class, an order
within that class, a family and a possibly a sub-family, a genus, a species and
maybe a subspecies according to its structure and apparent similarity to other
species. The final division – species or subspecies is based on differences
from others in the same genus. The name of the taxonomist who selects the
species name and the date of publishing that name is recorded. For now the
Western Ground Parrot is class Aves (Birds), order Psittaciformes, family
Psittacidae, sub-family Psittacinae, genus Pezoporus,
species flaviventris. (taxonomist
North, date 1911). There have been several iterations before this name was
arrived at.

Slow communication
led to some confusion in early days of European settlement. The first Ground
Parrot skins were sent to England from Sydney soon after settlement began in
1788. A taxonomist, Latham, named the
bird Psittacus formosus (Parrot
beautiful) in 1790. As another parrot had been given the name formosus, another taxonomist, Kerr,
renamed the Ground Parrot in 1792, this time wallicus, latinisation of New South
Wales. In 1793, another taxonomist gave it the name of terrestris (of the ground), but it was too late and although that
was an appropriate name, Kerr’s name had priority. Another taxonomist, Perry,
published the name Psittacus viridis
(Parrot green) in 1810, but he was far too late for the name to be adopted
permanently.

The skins arriving at
the Goteborg Natural History Museum in Sweden in 1864 were labelled as Pezoporus formosus (Latham). I am not
sure when the genus name Pezoporus (Walking)
first came into use.

Gregory Mathews
(1876 to 1949) became a taxonomist specializing in Australian birds early in
the twentieth century, and produced a major work in twelve volumes: The Birds of Australia. He became
infamous for splitting species into subspecies, many of which were subsequently
shown to be unwarranted. He accumulated a collection of 30,000 Australian bird
skins and 5,000 books on birds. The collection of skins ended up in the
American Museum of Natural History, New York, in 1931, and the books went to
the National Library of Australia, Canberra.

Mathews allocated
names for the Ground Parrot from different regions: Pezoporus terrestris leachii (Mathews, 1912) Tasmanian Ground Parrot; Pezoporus terrestris dombraini (Mathews 1914) South Australian
Ground Parrot; Pezoporus melanorrhabdotus
(replacement name for P. wallicus,
Mathews 1924). [This last name refers to the name given by Billardiere to the
Ground Parrot - Black-spotted Parrot.] All of those names were reduced to Pezoporus wallicus wallicus (Kerr), when
it was determined that all of the birds of the eastern side of Australia were one
taxon. The Western Ground Parrot was named Pezoporus
flaviventris (flaviventris means
yellow belly which is a distinguishing feature) by Alfred North in 1911.
Mathews made it a subspecies: Pezoporus
wallicus flaviventris. In 2009, genetic work showed the Western Ground Parrot to be a separate species in its own
right and so the binomial name Pezoporus
flaviventris (North 1911) has now been re-instated while the Eastern Ground
Parrot has reverted to Pezoporus wallicus
(Kerr, 1792).

References

Condon, H.T. (1975). Checklist of the Birds of Australia. Part 1.
R.A.O.U.

Robin, L. (2001). The Flight of
the Emu: A Hundred Years of Australian Ornithology 1901-2001. Melbourne
University Press.

Monday, September 9, 2013

The Ground Parrot was
close to extinction in South Australia when the South Australian Ornithologist published an article entitled “ The
Ground Parrot (Pezoporus wallicus) in
South Australia” by H.T. Condon in 1942. He describes the difficulty of finding
Ground Parrots by 1941, and the failure to persuade the powers that were to
save some habitat suitable for them. Sure enough, the last record of a wild Ground
Parrot in South Australia was a few short years later: in January 1945 (McGilp
1945).

We have reproduced here the photo of a Ground Parrot in
Adelaide Zoo that was used to illustrate the article, plus the first page of Condon’s
article. The entire article can be accessed on the link:

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

The photo within the article below could well be the first
photo of the Eastern Ground Parrot and is almost certainly the first published photo
of an adult bird taken in the wild.

Arthur Herbert Evelyn Mattingley was an enthusiastic amateur
ornithologist and a pioneer of bird photography. Born in Melbourne in 1870, he
was an inaugural member of the Royal Australasian Ornithologists’ Union, and a
founding member of the Bird Observers’ Club. His photos were pivotal in the
campaign to stop the slaughter of egrets for their plumes.

In the article below, his keen observation and enjoyment of
birds shines through. Mattingley would be pleasantly surprised to learn that the Ground Parrot, though endangered, can still be found in Victoria.